Smart webmasters know that by getting their sites listed on the ‘popular’ lists means a major influx of traffic, which can result in:

• Increases in RSS subscribers. A number of sites have documented a rise in subscribers after a post becomes popular on a social media site.
• Increased links back to your site. Many bloggers find things to write about on social media sites. If you’re popular, expect lots of nice links back from other blogs.
• Google Juice. The increased backlinks will ultimately result in better PageRank with Google and therefore higher placement in search engine listings.
• Reputation. As all these factors come into play, your site has the potential to become a trusted resource and this can all reinforce your reputation as an expert in your niche.
• Better advertising revenue. Maybe not immediately – social media users are an ad-blind crowd. But increased traffic and better SERP placement is likely to see better advertising opportunities over time.

As you can see, there is a lot to gain from leveraging social media sites. Note that I didn’t say ‘exploiting’ social media sites.

Seeding

Seeding is the practice of submitting links to social media and bookmarking services like Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and Reddit. There are countless others, although the impact of seeding is less if the service is less popular. Which explains why attaining the Digg front page is the goal for many bloggers!

Seeding becomes controversial when you’re only promoting your own site, or you’re seen to be submitting stuff purely to gain traffic. This is frowned upon by the users and moderators of social bookmarking services for a very good reason – it’s considered to be spamming. And everybody hates spammers.

The only exception to this rule is if you’re creating quality content and otherwise participating in the community. If you’ve created a unique article or post that will offer real value to visitors, then there’s nothing wrong with seeding your own pages. Nicer if someone else submits it for you though.

My Suggestions For Ethical Bookmarking

• Limit your activity. Not all social networking services will yield a result, and some are barely used at all. Why waste time with multiple submissions – you could be creating great content!
• Participate in the community. There’s a reason they call it Social Bookmarking – it’s all about people and connections. Find people with similar interests, comment where you can and build a solid friend list. You might actually enjoy it…
• Don’t just seed your own stuff. Share the resources you find interesting, particularly in your niche. It’ll vary your submission list and it’s a great way to reward other bloggers whose writing you admire. If you only seed your own stuff, you’ll look like a spammer.
• Be inspired by the community. Lots of bloggers get their inspiration from their social bookmarking tool of choice. They can also discover great writing in their area that they might never have found before. All this can generate ideas for you to write about and experiments to try on your own website.
• Above all, don’t spam. Not every post is worth submitting to a social bookmarking service. Shorter posts, or link posts that point out a resource but don’t offer any real insight are examples of this.
• Hope that people start to seed your pages. The Holy Grail of Ethical Bookmarking – in my opinion – is when people start watching your blog or website and seed your links for you. Word of mouth is better than self-promotion any day of the week!
• Seed other people’s pages. Reward websites and writers that you enjoy by bookmarking their work. It’ll give them all the benefits listed above, and your Digg account won’t look quite so spammy!

Start Your Ethics Engines

Creating an account on every social bookmarking service available is counter productive, spammy and a waste of time. I believe that you’ll really only see benefits from social bookmarking if you’re participating in the community. That means seeding other people’s pages, commenting on posts and building up a network of friends.

Also, by focussing on one or two particular sites, you stand a greater chance of success with your bookmarking. And it’s long accepted knowledge that when you become popular at one site, it won’t be long before your content gets seeded to other bookmarking services. For instance, if you hit the front page of Digg, you stand a shot at getting popular on del.icio.us or reddit.

Self-promotion fuels hostility in social bookmarking users. Do it too much and you can expect a backlash. Let’s push to drop mercenary linkbaiting in favour of participation and fair use of social bookmarking services.

Well, a few weeks ago we formally launched two new blogs under the Unreality banner – Unreality Music (my baby) and Unreality Primetime (Lisa’s baby). Comparing our strategies last night, we realised we were taking extremely different approaches.

The Challenge

Over the course of the next twelve months, we will be battling each other to see who can build the most successful blog. We’ll measure success on a number of criteria, which I’ll reveal in a forthcoming post.

The Strategy

Lisa’s approach is primarily about content-building. She’ll watch the latest TV news and blog about it rapid-fire. I’ve never seen someone compile content so efficiently. Better still, she’s now got contacts in TV publicity, so she gets a lot of the inside scoop on shows. I joked with her at the weekend that there’s no point reading the TV guide anymore, because she’s usually two days ahead.

My approach to writing is much more methodical. I’ll be writing about music, so I research the band in advance. I’m a slower writer by nature anyway. On the music blog, I’ll be working on a link building strategy and possibly trying to use social media to gain backlinks to the blog, which Lisa isn’t too worried about – she built Unreality TV up mostly on organic SEO!

The Outcome

The Blog Battle will end on 1 May 2008. Along the way, we’ll compare readership, traffic stats and how our strategies are working. Hopefully we’ll have two fairly successful blogs by the end of the year. Posts in this series will be tagged Blog Battle.

More importantly, we’ll be able to tell you which approach works best for a blog – pure content building and organic SEO, or less content but more focused on link building and social media promotion.

The goal here is to establish two top quality blogs using different methods and see how they perform over time. Although monetisation will be involved, the main motivation is to have fun building two great sites.

Anyway, we hope that other bloggers out there will follow our experiment and chip in with their thoughts and advice along the way. May the best (music) blog win!

Here’s the truth about getting your site listed on Google: all you need is another site to link back to you.

How Google Works

Google is a crawler-based search engine. Sounds creepy, but what this means is that Google’s technology ‘reads’ the web by following links on web pages. It then makes an index of the information it finds and uses that index to return results whenever you do a Google search.

In reality, if another public website links to you, like a trade directory or a business partner, then Google will become aware of your website through that link. Simple as that.

I think that submitting your site to Google is a bit of a placebo. Instead, concentrate on getting quality links to your site. This has more long-term effectiveness as Google counts every link to your site as a vote of quality, and the link itself will provide visitors with another way to find your site.